A worthy successor to the grand idea SF of Olaf Stapledon and the philosophically literate Stanislaw Lem, George Zebrowski writes with an uncompromising vision and a firm pen. His early masterpiece, Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia, was included in the Library Journal's list of the best 100 SF novels of all time, while his newest novel, Brute Orbits, won the 1999 John W Campbell Memorial Award. A tireless crusader for excellence in science fiction, George was quoted in Science Fiction Weekly as saying, “Be critical, give warning, but also show constructive possibility. Failures, of course, make for more drama. But the utopian/dystopian pendulum swing of SF since Frankenstein was published is the way to go. It's only when the pendulum stops that we should worry about the health of the field.”
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.
—Leo Tolstoy
J efferson James sat with the small tactical nuke in his right leg, his mind settled and ready to make the final decision. A year after he had lost his leg to a terrorist bomb he had left field operations and returned to low-level diplomacy, where his leashed tongue was trusted by his superiors and his opposite numbers. It occurred to him as he waited that he was either a fool or the most important man in all history.
“This is what you get for serving your political criminals,” his fiancée had said one day as she stared at the stump of his leg.
“Criminals?”
“Liar! The powerful steal from everyone—and we all connive with them to survive! You work for the thieves—from a desk. God knows what you did before!”
“It's the leg, isn't it?” he had said. “But I'll wear this dead one only until they grow my own.”
“Sure they will. You'll never have a truthful leg to stand on until you get a new brain!” She had raged for a week and then left him. For a better thief. How could it be otherwise—if what she said was true?
Now, as he waited for the meeting to start, he felt unsuited to talk to the aliens. No one was and no one could be, and the impossible moment waited just up ahead in the orderly divisions of time, freeing him to say anything, constructive or not. Talk for effect, agree to nothing, he had been told.
He tried to believe that he was here on his own, free of the person in his files. It was the only way to care now for a world that was ready to go on without him. How much time did he have to care? He could choose any moment after the meeting started. It was the only freedom left to him outside his thoughts.
Waiting, he wondered if a sum ever came out differently without errors in the addition. Maybe there was something he had overlooked, that everyone had overlooked. A faraway hope whispered to him that he wanted to live and heal into the new leg grown out of his own cells. They had long delayed that miracle, because life spans doubled by perfect replacement parts would diminish the power of the topmost. A leg had waited for him instead of a bride—but in his present state of mind he would gladly take a leg instead of a bride, and success over his life. She had been right, of course, up to a point, but that was just the way things were, and it was difficult to see how else humankind might have risen out of the subsistence poverty of nature, which was content to let an organism become just healthy enough to reproduce before it died; no wonder that the first few to achieve a surplus made pigs of themselves. One day all the horror of that first human climb would have to be redeemed.
There, he told himself, that was settled, as he thought of 2029, the first year of his prosthetic, a number obscuring numberless and differently noted histories, as the many still struggled in the grip of the few (who had learned well from the insurgencies of the many), and the year in which the alien breadboxes had appeared. Three in North Africa, where they were taken for a new form of impregnable American base; one in Germany, whose zealots hailed it as the long-awaited return of the wonder-weaponed Fourth Reich and demanded the dissolution of the government; near Colorado's NORAD-Space Command, where they were declared to be inflatable confusions raised by protestors; three around Shanghai, where a bitter old architect insisted that they were his very own mental projections; three around Moscow, which wisely said nothing; and one in the Australian outback, to which frenzied citizens rushed with the hope of buying tickets to an apotheosis, or at least to an extravaganza of happy revelations.
White rectangular boxes a thousand meters long and half that across. No comings and goings. No communications, despite officious government lies about being “directly in touch,” while people within a hundred kilometers or more insisted that they heard a soft starsong calling for them to “gather ‘round.”
“Once they get a toehold, we won't be able to drive them out,” Jefferson was told.
“Can we now?” he asked. More of a foothold than a toehold, it was an insult to the power of the world's hierarchies, whose client states began to doubt their allegiances as they called their anxious masters on secure lines from undisclosed locations for their usual daily instructions and were told to do nothing. Bunkered high officials took their calls in panic and anger, but gave no advice except to wait. Were the major states ready to collaborate, even surrender if it meant retaining their positions? asked the lesser states. Ballets of fearful ifs danced through the houses of power, and the word came down that no collaboration would be tolerated.
Wounded but doggedly loyal, doubts had wandered into Jefferson James as climate change slowed, diseases died, sterile oceanic zones filled again with life, and a large asteroid missed the Earth. The sway of the fossil fuel families weakened as alternatives surged into a truly free market. Adam Smith and Karl Marx smiled in their graves as officialdom denied that the alien presence had anything to do with these long-planned improvements, but seized the various black boxes into which anything electrical might be plugged with no limits on amperage or voltage output—and found empty “quantum vacuum wells” that unnerved older physicists and happily awed younger ones. Several smaller nations claimed these innovations to be the result of their own secret efforts.
The topmost fewest whispered amongst themselves that they were no longer the masters of the many. Too much “peace and plenty” withered power. More for the many, less for the few undermined the very meanings of “more” or “less.”
“We won't let it happen!” they had cried in secret conclave, trembling before the likely loss of domains so carefully interlocked with other topmosts—and had declared the alien structures to be illegal settlements.
There was no choice left but to safely bomb from on high.
But the wondrous boxes were not breached by even the cleanest of clean bombs in the most acute angular strikes. The humiliation of the fewest festered as their bottom-feeding clients awaited a new master. In desperation, the fewest of the few hand-carried a message to the domes on large posters, in every language:
CAN WE TALK?
“Of course,” answered a female voice, heard everywhere.
“Where?” asked the startled UN secretary-general, addressing the air in front of his newly renovated glass building. Buried strategists had pushed him forward to carry a sign for the planet. “Where?” he had asked again.
“Anywhere. All will hear.”
“Couldn't we…keep this…private?”
“We are being heard everywhere in the world's commons. But if you like, come to the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria in New York City.”
Three need-not-to-know delegates were sent with the nuke in Jefferson's leg. If you can't beat an enemy's weapons, you must defeat the occupiers face-to-face and not count the cost. We must do what they least expect, he was told as they readied him for this sacrifice of one for the many, including the topmost, however one felt about the mass of humankind, his lost bride included.
He looked up as four figures walked into the bright, windowed daylight of the cafeteria—tall, healthy-looking humanoids with olive skin and short brown hair, two men and two women, it seemed to Jefferson James. They glided in with an irritating arrogance, sat down on the other side of the large wooden picnic table, and smiled.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“And by what right have you built…put these things on our homelands?” asked Hugo Herbert, the pale German at his right.
“Please realize,” said John Ke, the tall Chinese delegate whom everyone also knew as an acceptable Russian double agent, “that we feel strongly about your uninvited presence.”
“There was no need to use weapons against us,” said one female, and they all smiled like sophisticated children.
We won't apologize for anything we do, Jefferson wanted to say but restrained himself. “Who are you?” he demanded again. “And where have you come from?”
The second, plainer-faced female said, “From here, half a million years ago.”
“Impossible!” cried Hugo after a silence.
The Chinese speaker said, “We are the oldest.”
“The evidence is beneath the domes,” said one of the males. “But we offer our genome for examination, if you wish. We would not be able to converse easily if we were not from here.”
Still startled, Jefferson asked, “But why would you want to come back?”
“Sentiment,” said the second male.
“Our roots,” said the first woman.
Jefferson labored to laugh. “With all your obvious advances, you are moved by…sentiment?”
The woman smiled and said, “Some of us, but sentiment and sympathy are the basis of ethics, as you may well know.”
“Well, it's one theory,” Jefferson said, and felt useless; the aliens had already enforced their will and were capable of much more even if a few of them died here.
“You have no rights here,” he said calmly, wondering if his superiors would advise him through the implant or rely entirely on his judgment. The matter had been left open.
“How long will you stay?” asked Hugo.
“For as long,” said the first male, “as the need sings within us.”
“Sings?” asked Ke.
“Sings!” cried Hugo. “Who are you, really, and why did you leave, as you claim?”
“We were helped,” said the first woman.
“And our ancestors were left behind?” said Ke.
“A small population at the time,” she said.
So there are at least two humanities, Jefferson thought. Maybe more, if all this was true. “Who or what helped you?” he asked.
“We don't know much about them,” the second woman said.
“Tell us what you do know,” Jefferson said.
“Quantum-field trollers, you might call them,” she said, “but they rarely interfere.”
“More than enough,” whispered Hugo.
Jefferson said, “And they…helped only a few?”
“Enough.”
“What were they?” he asked.
“We never saw them.”
“But why did they take you?”
She said, “To string intermediaries between emerging forms of intelligent life.”
“And you're here to add us to the string?” Jefferson asked. Or reattach a lost piece, he thought.
“Perhaps.”
So there was a purpose, an uncertain one, Jefferson thought as he scratched his phantom limb. The ghost behind the interim prosthetic had not visited him for some time. Cutting free an earlier sample of humankind was a survival strategy, but there might still be another motive beyond stringing neighborhoods across the cosmos.
“But this is absurd,” he said. “Half a million years invalidates all rights of return.”
The second man said, “You are getting much better at destroying yourselves.”
“And you will save us?” Jefferson said.
“Do we ask permission to aid the injured?” asked the first woman.
“Please request our help,” said the second man.
Jefferson looked blankly at him. Odd responses, misunderstanding, stupidity, or a hidden purpose?
“Request it,” insisted the alien, and Jefferson felt that the powerful-powerless divide would not be bridged; each side could say anything, even nonsense, and it would not matter. Much worse, the help of these alleged cousins would change too much. Worse than any political redistricting in nation states.
Jefferson asked, “Are you suggesting that we need more help?”
“You need no help to destroy yourselves,” the first woman said. “Assure us that you will not and we will leave.”
Jefferson felt suddenly that he wanted them to go and also to stay.
“Shall we stay?” she asked with a show of sympathy.
His diplomatic training aimed at a familiar humanity that was not rational but rationalizing, not at beings who seemed to be either the reverse or powerful naifs.
“But you want to stay,” he said, “to cleanse us of our devils.”
“You know the need,” she said.
They see monsters, Jefferson thought, and wondered how survivalist origins might ever be surpassed. Controlled, perhaps, never removed.
“We are not strangers, we are you,” the second woman said, “and also struggle with ourselves.”
“But not as badly as we do,” Hugo said skeptically.
“Tell us more about our mutual past,” Jefferson said, suddenly uncaring of who they were; right or wrong, helpful or harmful, they had no right here. Keep that in mind. A world, like a nation, must control its borders.
“We have come home,” said the first man.
Jefferson asked, “Who among you are not…nostalgic? And where are they?”
“Out there,” he said, glancing upward.
“Throughout the quantum field's endless histories,” said the first woman.
Were they ghosts of some kind? Jefferson asked himself. Quantum spirits, or thoughts?
He stood up suddenly. “You are unjust!” he shouted, diplomacy be damned. “You can destroy us, but we can't touch you. That is no basis for negotiation.”
“We will not destroy you,” said the four in unison, and he thought of a porcupine, unapproachable and smug behind its quills.
“Why not?” he demanded, still standing and half believing that these hard-to-hate naifs might be turned away with words.
“We are good,” they said in unison.
“What?” he asked.
“Surely you have felt…goodness?”
He sat down into a skewering silence, then said, “We don't want you here, and demand that you leave. You can't just come here and occupy us.”
“An outrage,” said Hugo. “Your very presence and your help will discourage us from developing as we would have on our own.”
The first woman, whom Jefferson James had begun to think of as Eve, said, “No culture grows without intrusions and constraints.”
“Even given your best intentions,” said the Chinese-Russian double agent, “we will not be the light of our world. You will become that light….”
“Take from us what you like,” she said.
Light up and lighten up, went through Jefferson's head. “And if we don't?” he asked instead.
Eve said, “You will harm yourselves.”
“So you will stay?” he asked, thinking of his unstaying bride.
“Yes,” she sang to him, and he felt relimbed by the music of her voice.
“And imprison us in your shadow,” he said. “Can you understand that?”
“Shadow?” she asked.
“Your…superiority,” he said, avoiding her gaze.
“A few may feel humiliated,” said the second woman. “Most will benefit.”
“Oh, so you do understand the effect,” Jefferson said.
“Learn from us,” Eve said.
“We'll drive you out,” he muttered as pride's vise took hold of him.
The first man said, “Note that you are speaking freely.”
“Easy to be tolerant,” Jefferson said, “since we cannot harm you.”
“You do not speak to us as equals,” said Hugo.
“That,” said the first man, “will not affect our ways toward you.”
“Heaven help us,” Jefferson muttered, then saw that Eve was smiling at him, her large eyes unblinking in her unlined face.
“We have been here for some years now,” the man continued, “and know that you are not a cowardly people.”
Just thieves, he thought, as silence shouted the truth of inequality, and Jefferson felt the strain of his own leashed anger.
“But you do know,” the man continued, “the difference between lesser and advanced states of mind, since you have treated many of your regions accordingly. Imperfectly, with gain in mind, but with the hope, in some of you, that your advancement would be of help, later.”
Some of us, Jefferson thought.
“I know well,” said Ke. “A wall…a line has to be drawn or all may be lost to the horde.”
“That line will not be a wall between us,” said the man. “Unavoidably, some may cross it sooner than others.”
Jefferson's thoughts danced on slippery slopes. Tangled motives and confused treasons shouted at him from deep pits.
“Your climb,” Eve said to him, “will be up to you.”
The man continued, “Raise the many and remove the burdens of power from the few. Restraint of the many slows progress and also harms privilege. You destroy only to build up again, to keep the many down by busying them with rebuilding, recruiting a few for their ability. Wealth's power weakens you, passing to progeny like a disease. A disease to the many who cannot have it and a diseased fear in those who cling to it.”
Jefferson had heard too much of this from thinkers with too many answers, and had grown immune to pointed arguments, living as he had among people who believed in their immunity and would have cast him out if he had spoken out. A raised bottom would do as well or badly as the topmost who had ever held power—that much was true, but not enough to say that there was no other way. Had not a desert god offered one?
“Distribute power's burden everywhere,” the man from the stars continued, “but let backwardness run through its own fevers.”
Jefferson gave him an amused look and asked, “Do you know how backward they are…below us?” It was a stupid question, he realized. Of course they knew.
Eve nodded at him. “But we hope, those of us who still feel for this place, or we would have let you fail.”
They are fools, he told himself, and fools can take them out. I can take them out.
“You're interfering with our necessary fever,” he said, turning their angelic logic against them. But what was logic and truth spoken to power? When had anything changed except under the pressure of catastrophe?
“So how shall we settle all this?” asked Hugo. “If we fail here, the world will become an endless insurgency, and we will have let it happen!”
“A patient must not be left to fall out of his bed,” Eve said to Hugo's suddenly tearing eyes. “There is no freedom from merit and truth, and only slavery for those held back from decisions.”
They were going to dictate, Jefferson realized, but would it be with Jove's thunderbolts or Jehovah's commandments?
“You will disarm,” Eve said.
Jefferson thought of declawed cats and wondered whether there would be any body parts left after the incineration? His implant was silent.
“You will be inspected,” Eve said.
“Or what?” he asked, seeing sides of beef hanging in a freezer.
“Better your world,” she said. “Those of you who have the power to better it do not because you fear the rise of new powers. That is also why you have not opened the way to your sun system's resources.”
He stood up and was unable to speak as he realized what he would have to do.
He sat down again and felt small.
“No need,” the four said in unison, “to keep climbing over the deaths of generations, hating yourselves in a universe rich enough for all.”
“But,” he stammered, “you will…police us,” racing with his fear, straining to hear what his implant would offer.
“Yes,” said the foursome from the stars, and he knew that there would be those who would happily join the choir of the new hegemony, and sing as they had with the previous congregation before new masters, rejoicing that they were no longer alone, that kindred souls now sang with them in the big dark, that they were in fact not the universe's only children, even though he had sometimes wished it for himself when he had felt his brother's weight, to have been born alone; but there was a difference, he realized; solitary was not the same as alone in an empty universe. The quarantine of light-years bestowed a time to grow and learn, and should not be lifted too soon….
He struggled past himself, recalling Arthur C. Clarke's claim that “if the decades and centuries pass, with no indication of intelligent life elsewhere…the long-term effects on human philosophy will be profound, and may be disastrous. Better to have neighbors we don't like than to be utterly alone.”
Well, now we have them, he told himself, invading our cradle, and we don't like them. And he wished that this were a dream or a story, where nothing is proven—and he rebelled against the parenting universe that had brought these well-meaning, gently violent intruders to break a natural quarantine and crush human pride for its own good. They were the imaginary god of that Bronze Age tribal library called the Bible, tampering too effectively with human history. If somehow this was a story, then nothing could be learned from it, nothing decided; but it was not a story; it was a reality to be stopped because we “cannot bear too much reality,” said the poet.
So invent your own and be damned….
Self-hatred filled him, and rage at being found out and judged, exposed to the gaze of outsiders who claimed kinship, spoke plausible truths, and turned love on and off with a glance. Exposed also to his own gaze, as one who needed no instruction from strangers to know that there had never been a human day when someone was not bending a knee to power and receiving a medal for failure, being executed or quietly murdered in some dark place. In all of humankind's serial wars against itself, he thought, we have never defeated ourselves….
Looking up, he gestured to the four and asked, “Is there a God?”
Eve said softly, “Not the extreme, eternal, all-powerful being above all others.”
A Jesuit had once told him that faith's insistence was about something else that was yet to be understood—a state toward which humanity was striving, somewhere ahead in cosmic history's hyperpersonal noosphere.
“What do you mean?” he asked as his unfeeling leg longed for its ghost, still alive somewhere in the quantum dream, questioning his new leg inside his stem cells about whether he would live to knit back into himself. Would killing these four in the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria do anything but set back the clock?
What had they not told us?
They had been gone too long, his pride cried, past any historical rights of return. What else were they not telling? That maybe we weren't from here at all, but something like Plato's souls come from afar in a ten-thousand-year cycle of swirling reincarnation? What further humiliations awaited his kind?
He asked the question.
“Oh, no,” Eve said. “You are from here. We all are.”
“And God?” he asked her softly.
“God is the best in us,” Eve said.
“No more?” he asked.
“What else do you need?” she answered.
“That…that God is there,” he said, and can overpower us, he thought madly, exhausted at a picnic table by a struggle with angels!
“A principle is there,” she said, “and has always existed because a true nothing, a zero-field, is impossible. Being is always full, always has been, and needs no beginning. That's just the way it is observed to be. You don't ask beginnings of a god, so why demand it of being? But that is all beside the point—because you don't need authority to choose right from wrong. A godless infinity leaves us responsible to one another, to choose our own way. Anything else would be a tyranny. Would you wish anything less than this freedom? It is the best possible universe, until we learn enough to make another. If anything made it, it was wise beyond imagination to have left us alone.”
“So there is no God?” he said. And we may do as we please, he thought. Dostoyevsky's non sequitur still damned.
Eve said, “Do not succumb to confusions. Ideas coincide with experiences. Superstition arises from an experience hooked by imaginings, refuted only by evidence. Wishful insistence offers the invincible but false comfort of certainty in an uncertain quantum. Pascal's Wager, for example, was his superstition. He would have won his wager only if he had encountered his god after death—and never known if he had lost.”
“And you approve of uncertainty?” he asked. All his old student fears and loves and longings lay nakedly answered.
As if binding a wound, she said to his dismay, “Faith is a brute alliance of culture and physiology to support needed ways, which are feared to be arbitrary if they can be chosen or rejected, and so have to be given a plausible pedigree. But right and wrong have their own authority, free of divine insistence.”
“And you came here,” Jefferson said, “to disabuse us of…faith?”
“No,” she said, “faith's insistence flows harmlessly away when you see the needs it was meant to serve.”
“Then why are you here?” he asked, holding his anger, praying for his implant to speak.
“There are those among us who know where intelligent life grows and perishes, and regret that some distant contribution might be lost.”
“What contribution?” demanded Hugo. “You know too much to learn anything from us.”
“A distant contribution,” Eve repeated. “Insights still to come, about what it is that we find ourselves in, where we have come from, and where our creativity might take us. At the edge of knowledge waits a greater beyond.”
“And your others,” Jefferson said to her purblind hopes, “do they care?”
“They do not,” she said. “That's what it's like out there. Freedom sometimes chooses not to care, even when answers are clear.”
And suddenly he felt that all the gifts the visitors had brought and the harm humanity had done to itself was nothing before the need to resist being occupied and subsumed. He felt its nameless pull—the same immunity that rejected transplants but would embrace his own cells when his new leg was grown and he might not be here to claim it. His kind would go back to its fevered ways, free of strangers, he insisted to himself even as Eve's face revealed to him that they had come to tire humankind of its past….
Wordlessly he said back to her, against all reason, that here is mine, my land, and no one will have it even if I have only one leg with which to stand on it, though God himself wanted it back from the creatures who had perished in evolution's slaughterhouse to make it their own….
He glanced at his German and Chinese colleagues; mercifully, they did not know that he had come here to die for humankind, for the many and for the unjust masters of the Earth, by obliterating the topmost who had come to pale humankind….
Might they also claim that humanity's time had been arranged a million years ago, that Clarke's mythic sowers in the field of stars were engaged in a patronizing dialogue with their harvest here at this table? That we would not be permitted to stumble into oblivion because intelligent life was too precious to let stumble, that there was no other way except to lead it past stumbling? He wanted to be ashamed of the bomb in his leg, of the hurting pride in his brain that might choose personal extinction to the humiliation of helpful occupation. Nature was survivalist, but its cruelty, bemoaned even by Darwin, would be bypassed—but not as a gift, he told himself, not as a gift. We won't deserve it unless we get there on our own, or not at all, the horror of the survivalist mill whispered to him. Natural selection or bust, even in the jungle of civilizations.
These visitors did as they pleased, he reminded himself, so why were they trying to convince us of anything? Maybe, despite all appearances, they were vulnerable, if only in their scruples, and naive enough to place themselves in his hands…because things from elsewhere had no right to his Earth. He lived here, irrational, heaving up from violent origins, uncaring of reason and knowledge, hateful but strong against strangers….
He closed his eyes and drifted ahead of his own death, but hoping for a reprieve from his implant.
It spoke, saying, “Do it now.”
His phantom limb lived as he sought the light of thunder—
—and the bomb did not go off.
He opened his eyes, trembling as he looked at his companions and wondered whether they had conspired to stop him. Maybe it was only a delay of some kind in the bomb's mechanism.
“Settle with yourselves,” Eve said, “and we'll leave.”
He took a deep breath.
But we won't settle, so they will never leave. Not anytime soon. They are us, he told himself. That's why they came back. Do we need their tyranny, or that of a god, to cease being “wolves to one another,” as Ben Franklin had put it, not as a question but as a principle stronger than any god?
Older words had asked, “If not now, then when?”
“Another time,” Eve said. She looked as if to ask him to tea, and for an instant he was startled by the sympathy in her gaze, and knew that it might all be settled. Only thunderbolts were to be preferred to artillery, and diplomacy to cannon, Napoleon had said, but not in his time, so he had never replaced his artillery.
“We came too early…,” Eve added.
“And your…settlements?” Jefferson asked, afraid of what else they could do, would do.
Eve said, “Accept them as embassies for wiser times.”
